bhat.log() > web

I have been on a lookout for a good LCD monitor for sometime. The biggest problem was on the cost None of the monitors were below Rs.16K, except for Samsung and Acer. Unfortunately few monitors which had some good reviews on the net where not available locally.

In the end I ended up with the following choice (all are 19inch):

• Viewsonic VX922 Though my fav on the list was VP930 which had pivot etc … but was not available locally nor in Singapore
• Dell 1907FP
• Samsung 940W

Though there were few 20inch monitors available at the slightly higher price band, I was already feeling my purse string stretch at the present price bands. How I wish, I could earn in $$’s as that would have entailed an upgrade to my display card.
Though Dell had a better ergonomics and pivot mode I decided to go for Viewsonic just because of the faster screen.

Yesterday the Viewsonic VX922 LCD monitor was collected by me.

After setting it up and getting my system up, this is what I noticed about the LCD:

• The monitor is too bright with the factory setting. I ended up reducing the contrast/brightness by half. Default Colors lean towards blue. You need to manually configure things.
• For this the OSD of the monitor is not that intitutive, nor the buttons work that great. There is a second delay between your button press and the actual action in the OSD. That’s baad.
• There is no easy way to callibrate

On the LCD panel performance:

• The colors are nice and bright. The screen has a good contrast for viewing even with a tubelight above and behind me.
• Playing games was a pleasure just because it was a bigger screen.
• Movies, weell, this is a problem area. In linux I could see the pixels very clearly (though this might be due to driver issues). In windows the DVD viewing was initially dissapointing as I could see the pixels and flickers whenever I was close to the monitor, but they were not visible once I shifted to a distance of a meter or so. Unfortunately the vertical view of the monitor is low (140 or so) which creates a problem when you are sitting in a surface which is slightly offcenter. Also in the sunset/sunrise shots, whenever there was a red spectrum spread, you could see the pixalation initially. But later on I couldn’t feel them (maybe because I got used to the image?)
• Fonts! Uggg… Surprisingly fonts look much better now in Linux (with Anti-Aliasing enabled) then in WinXP (even with Cleartype enabled). I installed the MS fonts on the linux and the screens looked much better then WinXP does. Go figure …

As my box has both DVI and D-sub output available, I was able to get my X-Server to work on Dual monitor mode with a single display card! Unfortunately this is not possible in WinXP. I need another card on this machine for that to work. Yuck!
After working on this screen the whole day: I like this monitor. I just which it would have been better in playing DVD’s though. Oh well P-MVA was out of my reach.